Where computers go to die.
Only two tools are necessary to disassemble a computer: a Phillips-head screwdriver and the floor. Almost everything comes apart with screws, but once in a while you have to get tough and use the floor tool. James Burgett illustrates. He grabs hold of the beige PC chassis I've been working on, lifts it up, and drops the whole fucking business on the concrete with a big crash. "You can't break it," Burgett explains gently. "It's already broken!"
Burgett is a big bear of a man with tight coils of hair held behind his head by a rubber band. We're fixing broken and obsolete equipment at Computer and Technology Resource Centers International, a nonprofit business he founded four years ago in San Rafael, California, 15 miles north of San Francisco. Today, the place is a huge warehouse stuffed with a jumble of PC parts in the middle of upscale Marin County. After turning up one of his favorite songs - "Mean Machine" by The Cramps - Burgett's ready to give me the grand tour.
First stop: a rubber trash can with piles of motherboards, VGA cards, and Ethernet cards spilling over the top. The container is waiting for one of the center's more advanced interns - say, someone who can discern a serial connector from a Centronics connector - to come along and sort the circuitry into the wooden bins that line the workshop walls.
Burgett pulls a hard drive from a scrap heap and, like Hamlet holding aloft a skull, says, "Here's a 40 megabyte C8 251. Used to be the standard of the industry at the end of the XT era and the beginning of the 286. Now it's almost worthless, except as scrap." Alas, poor Yorick indeed.
While some of the equipment is pure junk, much of it will eventually go into fully functioning machines destined for schools and charities. Burgett's center gives away 40 to 50 free computers a month, each with a one-year guarantee. On one shelf, there's a neat stack of a dozen 2400-baud modems bound for a human rights organization in Guatemala. The phone lines there can't handle high bandwidth, so these slow modems will be perfect. On another shelf, cannibalized floppy drives wait to be swapped into machines with busted ones. Over at his workbench, Burgett has a discarded computer tower with no CPU. To stretch its budget a little further, The Dixie School, a local K 5, is paying the center a few hundred dollars to install a new Pentium chip.
There is plenty of outdated gear to go around, plenty to be dropped on the ground, still more to be thrown away. Computers don't die anymore - they become obsolete. Drives and monitors sometimes fail but can always be replaced. As for the electronics, even Intel can't really say how long its processors last. And there's no market incentive to figure it out, either, since the chips will probably outlive the machine's moving parts. Besides, anyone who tries to study the life span of an integrated circuit probably won't be around to see the results - we may be talking centuries. More often than not, the machines in Burgett's warehouse run fine, but simply couldn't keep pace with the demands placed upon them.
Computers are becoming obsolete more and more quickly, filling up warehouses and recycling trucks at an astonishing rate. When Gordon Moore calculated that each new chip contains twice as much capacity as one made 18 months before, he didn't mention that his law also has an inverse: in theory, hardware sold six years ago has one-sixteenth the processing power of machines sold today. Industry analysts say most computers are now bought and retired in three to five years, and that life span is actually dropping - a phenomenon Thomas Rhinelander of Forrester Research attributes not only to the advent of new operating systems like Windows 95 and NT, but also to new applications developed by corporations in house.
Like the stages of a rocket, the old, beige boxes in James Burgett's warehouse have followed digital technology's precipitous rise over the last two decades, fueled its momentum, then fallen off somewhere in deep space. Now they're floating around in limbo. The Gartner Group estimates that worldwide 79 million computers had been retired from their primary lives by 1996. This year another 31 million PCs will join them, a number that will climb to 42 million in 1999. Rather than helping us reach escape velocity with the speed of their processors, old computers have instead contributed to our immanence - by tracing the vapor trail of Moore's Law, obsolete machines keep us rooted to the earth with piles of dusty cases.
But if old equipment doesn't just disappear, where does it go? Fewer computers are ending up in landfills, since businesses are starting to understand their value in terms of refurbishing and scrap. Sixty-five percent of corporate computers simply become "closetfill," according to the Gartner Group - and whether that means they end up in warehouses, empty offices, or under desks is anyone's guess. Another 15 percent are trashed, scrapped, or recycled, 15 percent are resold, and 5 percent are shipped off to schools, charities, or nonprofits.
With so much burdensome machinery lying around, it's tempting to wonder why more corporations aren't making charitable donations. Some firms worry that proprietary data might accidentally go out the door on an old hard disk, or that the monitors - considered toxic waste because of the lead they contain - might improperly end up in a landfill with the company's serial numbers on them. Even if they're hoping to get a healthy tax write-off by donating used equipment to charity, many companies are reluctant to face the administrative nightmare of culling broken hardware and finding a worthy recipient.
Nonprofit recyclers tackle these problems by serving as middlemen, creating a paper trail for each computer, wiping out data on the hard disk, and fixing up old machines, often with a one-year guarantee.And gradually, businesses are waking up to the fact that they can garner both tax advantages and good publicity by donating old machines to nonprofit refurbishers. The main benefactors of Burgett's work are big companies such as Visa, Cellular One, Wells Fargo, and Autodesk. Last year, in return for a US$150,000 deduction, IBM donated 1,000 top-notch machines to Gifts in Kind, a Virginia-based group that will divide them among 1,000 charities. "The computers were on a depreciation schedule, where the book value of each machine was about $150," explains Dave Berman, an IBM spokesperson. "
Two or three years ago these machines were state of the art, but now they're not useful to our business. We can either give them away or junk them and pay to have someone take them away."Two or three years may seem like a short turnover period, but then again, high tech firms have faster churn than your average bank or insurance house. Intel - which has donated 486s and even Pentiums to the largest nonprofit refurbisher in the US, the Detwiler Foundation's Computers for Schools Program - realized it needed better machines to move its employees to the Windows NT operating system. Bill Gates is not famous for his philanthropy, but Microsoft's bloated software has nevertheless resulted in a pleasant windfall for nonprofit computer recyclers.
Even given the small percentage of donated machines, organizations like Burgett's can hardly keep up with the supply of PCs ready for recycling. The output of the hundred or so nonprofit refurbishing centers around the US is well under 50,000 units per year, but many caretakers of trailing-edge technology work in makeshift ways and unlikely circumstances. When James Burgett started fixing computers for charity in his spare bedroom in 1994, for example, he had no idea his operation would eventually fill a 5,000-square-foot warehouse. But as a freelance consultant, he was the only nerd willing to transform a truckload of ancient IBMs into something useful for a nearby school. Look where it got him.
It's a spectacularly bright weekday in San Rafael, with the green and brown contours of Mount Tamalpais looming off in the distance. In front of the enormous aluminum doors at Computer and Technology Resource Centers International, truckloads of antiquated machines pour in all day long. Today's shipment, a donation from the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, consists mostly of old IBM-compatibles and dusty monitors. After we unload the machines fire-brigade style from truck to pavement, they sit in an 8-foot pile with other donations: PCs on one side, Macs on the other. It's just one morning's hoard, but there's already a jumble of broken cases, weird configurations, and antiquated equipment that faded from memory 10 years ago - IBM XTs, PCs, and ATs; Apple IIes; Mac 512s and SE/30s.
Burgett, the center's cofounder and guru of obsolete technology, walks around the pile like a connoisseur. "I was in love with these machines when they first came out," he says, pointing to an Apple II. Then, the skeleton of a server catches his eye, and Burgett sticks his fingers into its guts. "See, it comes with two 1-gig SCSI ports. They're obsolete and generally unpleasant. But if it weren't for us, this machine wouldn't go anywhere."
A few hours later I'm knee-deep in old hardware, trying to avoid the teeth of a speeding forklift. For a while, I help sort machines by processor and stack them on pallets, cordwood-style, in the sunshine. Rob Young, the network supervisor, wraps the stacks in sheets of industrial plastic wrap, like a spider saving his dinner. With the forklift, he piles the mummified gear 40 feet high in the cavernous warehouse, where it will wait until interns get a chance to test each machine, fix it, or break it down into parts. Everything goes through the facility in less than a month, and every piece of the animal is used. Whole, the machines would sell for about 8 cents a pound. But there's more money to be made by stripping off circuit boards, copper wire, and steel than by selling them in one piece.
The center supports itself on sales of scrap and weird equipment - like dumb line printers - and by hawking a few machines retail every month. But most of the working computers go to charities and underfunded schools. One nearby recipient, The Marin AIDS Project, uses a few dozen 386s and 486s to help shut-ins surf the Web to access data about the disease. "When you have AIDS, you have a level of fatigue that makes it really hard to get out of the house," explains Richard Lawson, a volunteer coordinator for the program. The Internet lets AIDS Project members link to the National Heath Center, various support groups, the Bulletin of Experimental Treatments for AIDS, and alternative medicine sites. Tony Sewell, who publishes IntroPoz, a newsletter of personal ads for people with AIDS, is just one of many using machines provided by Burgett and company.
Although the AIDS Project gets mostly higher-end stuff, old dinosaurs have their uses, too. The Cambodian Defenders Project, for instance, employs XT and 386 machines from the San Rafael center as simple wordprocessors. The international group found that typed statements, when submitted to Cambodian courtrooms, have a much better success rate in springing innocent detainees from jail. Since then, the seven old computers Burgett shipped to that country have contributed to the legal defense of 500 people - with a third of them receiving acquittal.
Back at the San Rafael warehouse, the interns are playing a game. They've discovered that the aircraft-quality aluminum rings used in large mainframe hard drives are fun to throw against the wall. Usually the 10-inch discs make a brassy clang when they hit the ground. But once in a while, they'll stick in the drywall with a satisfying thunk. Many people try, but only the sinewy, tattooed Rob Young can seem to make them stick. On a more rambunctious day, Burgett and his troops wheel two mainframes - originally worth hundreds of thousands of dollars - toward each other at high speeds until they collide. Burgett says they're trying to find a correlation between the original value of the white elephants and their kinetic impact. So far, the findings are inconclusive.
Still, there's a method to Burgett's madness, and a reason behind his irreverence. His brand of hands-on training makes interns feel comfortable working around unfamiliar technology. One of them, Christian Jaureguito, is a blind man who arrived at the center a year ago thinking he might answer the phones or do office work. Instead, Burgett handed him a screwdriver and a PC. Jaureguito started by unscrewing everything he could feel on the case, and now he can strip a PC as fast as any sighted person. There's also Katy, a well-to-do woman who thought that working with computers might be fun - even though she was initially too intimidated to open the box. And then there's me, the clueless journalist, mincing my way through my first PC. I certainly didn't feel comfortable among the green circuit boards inside, encircled by a maze of ribbon wiring, switches, and jumpers - all identified only by a chaos of letters and numbers.
Working in an environment where it's impossible to break anything comes as a relief to people like Mark Keithley, an enthusiastic guy in his early 30s with a deep tan and leathery skin. Keithley's heard just the opposite during much of his life - that he's likely to fuck things up no matter what he does. Last year the state gave him $21,000 for three years' back Social Security payments, withheld because of a paperwork blunder. "Never hand a junkie 21 grand and say, 'Here, go get your life together,'" Keithley says. The money vanished, and he got six months probation for driving without a license.
Keithley worked off some of his community service hours fixing machines for Burgett, and in the process, he learned a new trade - now he's a full-time computer technician with the center. He's probably not sober 24-7 yet, but even so, he's gotten a chance at a new life. In an industry where practical experience and a firm grasp of computer argot is half the battle, Keithley now tosses off blasé appraisals with the best of them: "God, man, working with a Zenith drive is about as much fun as bowel surgery," he groans. "It's all proprietary."
Most of the refurbishing outfits around the country - the "chip pickers," as they're known by industry analysts - have an intern-and-trainee component, so they benefit the world twice: sending good computers out the door and giving people the skills to fix them. Computer and Technology Resource Centers International could certainly use a few more interns, but Burgett stubbornly won't consider grant money. "It always comes with a leash," he complains.
The Detwiler Foundation, on the other hand, has helped channel $10 million in state funds to computer repair facilities and works with 52 vocational centers in California, including 13 state prisons. In 1996, they fitted a thousand of PacBell's old 386 machines with Pentium chips donated by Intel, and last November they reconstructed an additional 3,000 machines with 133-MHz Pentium chips. These topflight boxes went to schools all over the San Francisco Bay area. To expand the program nationally, Detwiler just received half a million dollars from AT&T to begin working with the state and federal prison systems. Yet Detwiler is just an administrative headquarters coordinating the task. It has no warehouse and no workshops of its own - which means it's missing half the fun.
Even so, things have been looking grim for Burgett & Co. One of their main hardware sources, Autodesk, dried up when the Sausalito-based firm grew miffed that Burgett wasn't placing donations with charities the company had chosen. Instead, Autodesk went to Renew Computers, a for profit recycling business.
Burgett's also been a little down about a delayed collaboration between his organization and a homeless advocacy group named Homeward Bound. With Homeward Bound's help, Burgett wants to set up a huge processing operation and expand the warehouse space by 10,000 square feet. At a remodeled military base in northern Marin, homeless people would learn skills under Mark Keithley's tutelage. But Homeward Bound has put the plan on hold for at least a year, and - more ominously - the group has started working with Renew as well.
Though Burgett has a heart of gold, he doesn't have the PR skills to persuade the corporate world to donate better machines and help the center's operations grow. He left home at 14, was homeless for long periods, even dealt heroin for a time - his arms still bear a user's scars. Eventually he moved to Marin, figuring that life there might be easier and gentler.
After the move, Burgett stopped dealing drugs and started running Dungeons & Dragons-type fantasy games for local twentysomethings in exchange for room and board. A lifetime techie and hacker, he finally got on his feet doing freelance computer repair work.
All this gives him an unsurpassed ability to work with the people for whom he can do a lot of good, but it can't touch the business savvy of the high-profile Detwiler Foundation - a group that has recruited Gayle Wilson, wife of California's governor, as a spokesperson. No one at Burgett's outfit can deliver a comparable hard sell to Fortune 500 firms. At the end of the day, Computer and Technology Resource Centers International remains eight groovy people and a few interns working behind two big garage doors in a former ice-cream factory.
Of course, there's no shortage of machines ready to be put to good use or scrapped for money. The center will survive. Lately, Burgett's been negotiating a deal to move a VAC 9000 mainframe to Russia for use in that country's space program. New opportunities always come up. And some corporate donors keep bringing him equipment, because they don't want publicity, or because they want to help a school or charity that's working only with the San Rafael center.
For the recipients of such free equipment, it's hard to lose. The nonprofit groups do a pretty good job matching the right computer with your needs, and the machines usually come set up and ready to go. Every recycler has a James Burgett figure somewhere back in the warehouse, someone who has lovingly restored each computer for reuse. Picking up old technology on the cheap is actually a pretty fair gamble. At worst, you choose a bum machine, waste a little time, and have to dispose of the junk yourself.
Ironically, it's the folks selling used computers for a living who have the tough job of convincing buyers that the old machines are really a good deal. To be sure, a few for-profit resellers do brisk business in surplus and refurbished machines - The Wall Street Journal notes that 2.4 million used computers were resold last year. And leasing companies such as Comdisco (www.comdisco.com/), whose average contract lasts less than three years, are already starting to sell off old Pentiums by the thousands. Still, you get the sense that their customers are mostly people familiar with the technology; they know how to pick a good PC out of the pile, and they know what can go wrong. The Boston Computer Exchange, for example, has sold used machines since 1982 and is legendary among early adopters. The first used PC broker in the United States, the exchange is now one of the nation's largest, with annual sales of $36 million. Onsale (www.onsale.com/), another reseller, handles as much or more in live auctions over the Net.
First-time owners, on the other hand, usually look for new computers, and they rely on the reputation of a national chain store or a manufacturer's warranty to feel comfortable. Brian Kushner of ReCompute in Austin, Texas, wants to change all that. Kushner had a brainstorm two years ago: he decided to standardize secondhand computers so that novices would feel confident enough to buy one. One of Kushner's models, for example, sells for about $899 - half the price of a new Pentium machine, including plenty of memory, a monitor, a warranty and service contract, and special start-up software for beginners thrown in. While most used computers are set up a few at a time in the back of some guy's fix-it shop, Kushner's store sells almost a thousand used 486s and Pentium machines a month, with four standard models to choose from.
Does Kushner worry that manufacturers will think he's moving in on their territory? On the contrary, the nearby Dell Computer factory is one of his biggest suppliers. When someone returns a Dell, the company regularly resells it to ReCompute. "We're expanding the market to users who wouldn't be able to buy a computer otherwise," says Kushner. "It's just like how the used car business propelled the new car industry in the 1950s."
Some secondhand computers continue their lives in one piece, serving in schools, charities, and the homes and offices of bargain hunters. Thousands more leave nonprofit refurbishers and computer resellers as scrap. So what's the final resting place for a truly dead PC?
After places like Computer and Technology Resource Centers International decide they have no use for a piece of equipment, professional electronics recyclers squeeze out the last few cents of value. While recycling for charity is a recent phenomenon, the pros have been around since before the first IBM personal computer.
HMR, an Australian-based enterprise, recycles all kinds of electronic equipment. Down in a forsaken industrial wasteland in San Francisco, next to an electric power plant, abandoned piers, and shipyards, HMR's 100,000 square-foot warehouse is big enough to generate its own weather patterns on a foggy day. Squadrons of propane-fueled forklifts race around the floor, moving nearly a million pounds of electronic gear in and out each month. While most of the space in this leviathan facility is occupied by pallets of beige PC cabinets, computers don't end their lives here. This is just another waystation on the path to a more drawn-out demise.
Like James Burgett's center, HMR used to break down PCs to get fixable machines running again and separate out scrap. But the price of RAM chips has plummeted from $12 apiece to just a dollar; with more efficient manufacturing, the amount of precious metals in boards has decreased. Today, HMR buys bulk electronic equipment for between 4 and 10 cents a pound, culls what it can sell off immediately - working machines and equipment with a secondary life - and stuffs the rest into cargo containers bound for the Philippines. There, 400 overseas employees swap parts into old PCs to get them running; recycle gold, copper, and steel; and make electric regulators out of power supplies. All in all, 70 percent of HMR's San Francisco inventory sails to Asia each month.
There are also plenty of smaller players at this point in the food chain, scrappers and recyclers who take dead computers apart and separate them into circuit boards, plastic, and steel. Sometimes they grind up whole machines and separate them into ferrous and nonferrous material. The steel cases go to a metal recycler. Cables go through a refining process that removes the insulation and recovers the copper. The plastic is often landfilled or incinerated as fuel; only in the last year have some electronics recyclers found ways to process plastic.
"Industry people get into the high tech business because they think it's sexy and exciting," says Kelly Corbet, whose business, Corbet Consulting, helps manufacturers prepare their products for a computer's last days on earth by using recyclable plastics and designing for easy disassembly. "But they don't want to think of the end-of-life issues."
Cathode-ray tubes, for instance, are the bane of computer recycling. When you're in front of your screen, the monitor uses lead to keep you safe from radiation - so much lead that recycling centers can become toxic waste sites just by holding on to them. Most of the toxic glass tubes get sealed into landfills. Some CRT screens, however, are crunched into shards and sent to a Canadian company called Noranda Metallurgy, where they're fed into a smelting furnace as flux to separate the copper from the nonvaluable material.Gold-printed circuit boards follow a more tortuous path. First, they're hammered and chopped into dime-sized bits, then the fiberglass - the green material that gives an integrated circuit its structure - is melted off. The resulting metals go through a grinding process, and the gold is recovered by smelting the dust. Noranda is one of the biggest smelters around, so many of the parts in your computer may one day end up either at a lead smelter in New Brunswick or an even bigger facility in Rouyn-Noranda, a northern Quebec town named after its largest employer.
No one's going to melt down the SDS 930, however. That business with dropping computers on the floor, or feeding them into the hungry maw of a fiery smelter? Forget about it. A vintage mainframe, the Scientific Data Systems 930 was used during the Cold War to monitor nuclear test agreements and process satellite data. The computer still exists, but I can't tell you where it is. Only Kip Crosby, executive director of the Computer History Association of California, and Edwin Vivian El-Kareh, its "tactical director," know the exact location. Still in perfect working order, the relic is the crown jewel of the association's collection.
Crosby and I are slated to meet at the Santa Clara Saturday Sale, a weekly event organized by a nonprofit recycler named Computer Recycling. All the big hardware collectors in town - mostly potbellied old-timers and high tech retirees - come by to do a morning once-through. For many, the weekend ritual of rummaging through flea markets, swap meets, and electronics salvage stores is an infinite loop disguised as fun. One week, you may drop a few bucks to buy a Hewlett Packard DeskJet printer. Next week, you'll go hunting for the software to drive it and the manuals to set it up. Inevitably, the thrill is in the chase, and the chase is never over.Describing himself on the phone before the swap meet, Crosby says to look for a 50ish man with a gray cardigan, black jeans, a strawberry-red fanny pack, and two steel crutches. With particulars like that, it doesn't take much work to spot him in the crowd. Crosby is flanked by two young hipsters, just a few years out of college. One is Peter Washburn, an advisory board member of the history association; the other is Erich Schienke, who helps edit the association's journal. Having majored in topics involving the social history of technology and the physics of Tesla coils, Crosby's understudies are as passionate about conserving vintage machines as their mentor. This morning they're all looking for parts and pieces to round out the association's collection. But this swap meet turns up nothing, so we move on to another junk sale across the Valley.
The Computer History Association already owns a broad representation of the famous microcomputers made in the Golden State - Apple Lisa, Adam, Kaypro II, Processor Technology SOL-20, Xerox Alto, IMSAI, Osborne Ones, Osborne Executives, Osborne Vixens, et cetera - fine machines that will soon have a showcase in the San Francisco Computer Museum, an educational and conservation institute planned by Crosby and journalist Fred Davis. In the meantime, along with the SDS 930, these legends of California computing reside in cargo containers in a parking lot somewhere in Silicon Valley.
Much of the collection was donated by readers of the association's journal, Analytical Engine. A well-written black-and-white desktop zine, it showcases contributors who get oddly aroused by such arcana as the ancestry of the desktop calculator, the birth of the Macintosh, and the special parts necessary to get obsolete equipment running. Some of Crosby's own writing positively anthropomorphizes computers. An article titled "De-Crufting a Power Supply Fan" begins: "The fan in the power supply of an average desktop computer leads a ghastly life. It survives on a diet of spiky wall voltage and dust-laden hot air." In other places Crosby is adamant that computers are dumber than dogs and nothing like people. In a draft of a mission statement for the museum, he says he wants to dispel the myth that computers can think like humans, or that artificial intelligence approaches anything like human reason.
These machines do, however, achieve a kind of transcendence. "Many computers don't die," Crosby allows. "What you end up with is a perfectly good computer as a doorstop. But you don't want to throw it out. There's something in the American psyche that rebels against throwing out a working computer."
When we arrive at the secret containers, the small corridor between the giant cargo boxes is quiet. Tactical director El-Kareh holds the keys and opens the doors. As they swing wide, tiny high-pitched, almost angelic sounds rise from the rusty hinges. Inside is a SDS 930, with all the original software, manuals, and documentation. It sits there, quiet but perfect, about two-thirds as long as the container. Boxes of software and books fill the rest of the space.
I'm beginning to understand. The soul of the machine isn't transcendent, like the one we learned about in catechism class. There is no computer heaven. Computers conform to an earlier creed, handed down to us by ancient Greeks like Aristotle. They occupy a plane where material existence - its formal configuration and its function - contribute to the soul's existence as much as notions of unseen spirits.
Though they've never met, both Kip Crosby from the Computer History Association and James Burgett from Computer and Technology Resource Centers International are preserving the life of the machine. With some luck, the SDS 930 will one day hum smoothly in an air conditioned room of a new computer museum. Likewise, Burgett's refurbished beige boxes have been reborn into some school or charity office. The recycler may replace every part, and he may not treat them with much respect, but the soul of the computer is imparted to its next user through the resurrected form of the machine.
As Crosby describes the phenomenon in Analytical Engine, "It's hardly necessary to 'anthropomorphize' the microprocessor to recognize the trait it most shares with humanity - a rapacious and half-blind destiny to flow into any niche that might accommodate it, nudging any number of applecarts into chaos on the way."
